The Card

Taking a look at the card, you can see we've got a massive cooler on hand which comes as no surprise. We've got three fans, and you can see, we've got two larger ones on the outside, while a smaller one is seen in the middle. Behind it, we've got a massive heatsink and a number of heat pipes that run throughout the card.

If we turn the card over, you can see a plate that covers almost the entire card with just a small portion of the PCB being seen. Just above our PCIe slot, you can see the GPU Reactor that is something MSI introduced a while ago. The extra PCB directly behind the GPU brings with it cleaner power. For the most part, we have always felt this is something that comes in handy for more extreme overclockers.

As we start to make our way around the card, you can see at the back of the card we have three V-Check points. In conjunction with the cables we saw in the bundle, you're able to get the voltage levels of multiple areas of the card. Again, this is something that extreme overclockers will make more use of than regular overclockers.

Continuing to work our way around the card, you can see that power comes in the form of two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Staying across the top and moving closer to the front, you can see two SLI bridges that give the ability to run up to four of these cards together in SLI.

Finishing up with the I/O side of things, you can see we've got two Dual-Link DVI connectors - one being DVI-D, and the other being DVI-I. Along with the two DVI ports, you can see we've also got a HDMI and DisplayPort connector.

Specifications

Being a Lightning video card means that we're dealing with an overclock out of the box. Our of the box, a reference GTX 780 carries with it a core clock of 863MHz, which is then boosted to 900MHz. Looking below, you can see that MSI has pushed the base clock to 980MHz and then pushed the Boost clock to a strong 1033MHz. As for the 3GB of GDDR5, like we see most companies do, MSI has chosen to leave that alone.

Being a Lighting card, we ultimately want to see what happens when we overclock the card ourselves. Looking above, you can see we pushed the core up to 1020MHz, which is then boosted even higher to 1073MHz. As for the 3GB of GDDR5, we managed to also push that from the default 6008MHz QDR to 6540MHz QDR.